Amanda for This Season

Mean girl? Dream girl, more like. The very pale and very interesting Amanda Seyfried will soon be lighting up a big screen near you in Les Misérables and Lovelace. Here she swaps Napoleonic nighties and 70s micro-minis for some of the loveliest looks from the latest couture collections.

It takes a very smart blonde to play a dumb one as well as Amanda Seyfried does in Mean Girls. The way she tells Lindsay Lohan that she can put her whole fist in her mouth and that her boobs can predict the weather. Perfection. The real-life Amanda smiles her vast smile and practically purrs at the memory. She is curled up like a kitten in a big chair at the London hotel Claridge’s, wearing a baggy jumper, leggings, and no makeup, pale as milk chocolate and slight as a blade of grass, hair cascading halfway to the floor. “Back then I thought every movie that was made found an audience and things were all stars and butterflies,” she sighs, “before I developed a relationship with this world.”

Her relationship with this world nevertheless seems to be in pretty good shape. She is adored in America for her role in the HBO series Big Love and universally for her perky turn in Mamma Mia! She shared scenery-chewing honors with Gary Oldman in Red Riding Hood. Next up is an all-star adaptation of Les Misérables, an Oscar-magnet complete with rousing live-action sing-alongs, and a saucy biopic, Lovelace, in which she stars as the Deep Throat actress Linda Lovelace.

Despite all the poverty and pornography, it sounds as though she managed to keep herself amused on both shoots. In Les Mis she plays the adopted daughter of Hugh Jackman. Is it true, I ask, that nobody has a bad word to say about him? “There is nothing bad to say about Hugh. He isn’t human. I bet you anything he’s got some kind of superhuman capabilities, beyond just being just the kindest, gentlest soul I’ve come across.” Plus, she says, he has a wildly inappropriate sense of humour, which she shares. Together they invented alternative story lines that transformed their characters’ tender relationship into something altogether less innocent, like the old Renault “Papa!” and “Nicole!” ads gone wild. “We sexualized everything as much as we could. It was really funny, the moments we could find . . . It’s like every movie has another version, another satirical version of itself.”

Lovelace presented different challenges, though sexualizing her on-screen relationships with her co-stars wasn’t one of them. “We were doing a scene where I was supposed to be going down on Peter Sarsgaard,” she recalls. “We used a popsicle, and I had my arms covering the popsicle. It was footage that he was going to show the Deep Throat guy, to get her into the movie, to get her cast. I was laughing hysterically throughout. I couldn’t stop laughing.”

The conversation turns to less provocative subjects, such as the London transit system’s electronic ticketing system—“the most genius thing in the world”—and her belief that Englishmen can stay in shape while drinking immoderately and rarely doing any exercise. “A lot of English guys have a metabolism like you,” she insists. “Dominic, for instance,” meaning her ex-boyfriend, the actor Dominic Cooper. “Eight-pack. Doesn’t do anything.”

After the bonnets and bodices of Les Mis and the thigh-high leatherette boots of Lovelace, she seems relieved at the prospect of slipping into something a little more comfortable for V.F. Valentino, Dior, Elie Saab, with nary a popsicle in sight.